Special feature

 Photo by DC Tedrow

Following a march through downtown Austin, anti-war activists Yazan Al-Hasan, Bobby Whittenberg, and Zachary Lown protest at City Hall, Feb. 28.

At a time when domestic anti-war activism seems dormant, groups of veterans continue to press forward with important workshops and compelling testimony from individuals with direct war experience. In September, for example, the groups, Iraq Veterans Against the War and U.S. Labor Against the War, expanded their concerns to recognize work issues in Iraq which war makes dangerous. The groups hosted representatives of the largest labor unions in Iraq to bring these problems to American attention.  The meetings in the Northeast ended at a gathering with Quakers at the Friends House in Philadelphia. In October a four-day retreat for women soldiers and veterans of that conflict in Tomales Bay, California. 

The September and October events build on earlier high-profile activities, including presentations in Austin and Washington. About 1,600 current and former U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, or at Guantánamo Bay since Sept. 11, 2001 make up Iraq Veterans Against the War, which began appealing directly to American public opinion in July of 2004. Since then, IVAW members in the United States, Canada, and even Iraq have been spreading a message of war resistance, complete troop withdrawal, reparations for the Iraqi and Afghan people and healthcare benefits for returning troops.

In early May, retired Marine Corporal Rick Reyes and ten other veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan visited Capitol Hill to try persuading members of Congress not to approve a supplemental bill for nearly $100 billion to fund the conflict in Afghanistan.

"What pained me in Afghanistan was witnessing too many civilian casualties, too many children without food and women without husbands, too many innocent Afghans who became anti-American because of our actions," Reyes said in a May 16 interview with OpEdNews. "But what pains me now is witnessing too many members of Congress, too many Administration officials, and too many think-tank experts who support this military approach."

A few weeks before, Reyes voiced similar concerns when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by John Kerry, himself once an outspoken veteran who campaigned against the war in Vietnam. Reyes described what he considers to be an unwinnable, immoral war in Afghanistan. He is not alone in denunciation. Reyes is also a winter soldier, drawing on the concept of military particpants who share their testimony on war with their fellow citizens.  The practice harkens back to words of Thomas Paine, the American patriot who in 1776 warned against "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots," who would "shrink from the service of their country" in a time of crisis.

The first Winter Soldier event was held in December 1970, when a Citizens Commission of Inquiry convened in a hotel where veterans testified to widespread, officially condoned war crimes and atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam. A month later, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organized another series of hearings in which 109 vets and 16 civilians unburdened themselves of their painful experiences: tortured prisoners, murdered civilians, destroyed villages and indiscriminate killing. In March 2008, IVAW took a cue from VVAW by holding its first contemporary Winter Soldier event in Connecticut. The mainstream media ignored the gathering, but, soon thereafter, antiwar activists were organizing regional events such as a recent meeting in Austin at the Central Presbyterian Church.

What many IVAW members claim to have witnessed or experienced in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay is now backed up by evidence not available when the global movement against the Iraq war first emerged in February 2003. A now declassified Congressional report released on April 23 showed that torture and other coercive interrogation techniques were approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration. The new information implies that the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be chalked up to the work of a few "bad apples" acting on their own.

This report contradicts Donald Rumsfeld's claims that Pentagon policies played no role in detainee abuse reported at U.S. military detention centers such as Abu Ghraib. It documents how some of the techniques used at military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay—including stripping detainees, placing them in "stress positions" and depriving them of sleep—originated in military programs that trained American troops to resist abusive interrogations, The New York Times reported, but were never intended to be practiced on U.S. prisoners.

President Obama also stirred controversy by reneging on his promise to the American Civil Liberties Union that he would release several photographs of detainee abuse at U.S. detention centers. Obama justified reversing his decision on the grounds that releasing the photos would only "further inflame anti-American opinion" and "put our troops in danger." Releasing the photos raises other issues as well, including whether to do so further humiliates the prisoners and adds to the suffering of their families. Nevertheless, Obama's backpedaling draws widespread criticism from his opponents and even many supporters, since it furthers the Bush administration's commitment to hiding torture rather than Obama's promise to be transparent and accountable.

The mounting controversies lend further credibility to claims made by members of IVAW. This newer vet group may be smaller than its 1960s counterpart Vietnam Veterans Against the War — whose ranks swelled to 20,000 members by 1971.  But it spearheaded the stateside effort to end the U.S. wars in the Middle East. Like Senator John Kerry, who 38 years ago called Congressional attention to human rights violations in Vietnam, these soldiers relate the underbelly of war.

 Photo by DC Tedrow

Members of Iraq Veterans Veterans Against the War march through downtown Austin after delivering public testimony, Feb. 28.

And people listen. More than 200 people gathered in downtown Austin on Feb. 28 for the South Central Winter Soldier event. They sat spellbound for nearly three hours as IVAW members and other activists shared their experiences of war resistance and the realities of war and occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Their testimony exposed military corruption, abusive policies, and degrading treatment of soldiers in the Bush administration's ostensible, oftentimes illegal, war on terror.

Detainee invention and plausible deniability

During his second tour in Iraq, former Staff Sergeant Ronn Cantu served as a human intelligence collector, or HUMINTer. His job was to interrogate and conduct source operations, in which interrogators looked for Iraqi citizens who would give U.S. forces information willingly.

"I'm going to give this audience a crash course into how a military-aged male becomes a detainee," he began, before explaining how he and his team abused dual-source reporting methods to increase arrests.

"In 2007, which was the last year I was in Iraq, there were three things required to get a detainee into the American-run detainee system," Cantu said. A person could either be caught committing a violent act, caught in possession of physical evidence such as rockets or bomb-making materials, or identified by dual-source reporting. If two different sources identified the same person as a possible enemy to U.S. forces in a written statement, that person was considered "dual-sourced," and could be arrested and detained indefinitely. No objective investigation was mounted first nor were the motivations of the sources questioned.

The military's need to quantify success meant that "detainees had become the new body count" in Iraq, Cantu said. "So when the word came down that we had to move quicker to take down people designated as leaders, we had two choices: do what's ethical, or please our masters. We went with the latter."

The number of detainees held by coalition forces peaked at 26,000 in 2007, according to the U.S. military. As Cantu described it, reaching this figure seemed disturbingly easy. Instead of waiting for two people to identify the same person separately, Cantu's team instead asked sources to come in with a friend or family member. "We rationalized that, if the individual and his brother both know the same criminal, then what's really the problem?" he explained. Cantu testified that his team would also invent sources in cyberspace or have an interpreter write a statement in Arabic and sign it as an informant.

Eventually, Cantu's team manipulated information so often that the American-run detainee system was no longer accepting it. He said that they then turned to the Iraqi-run detainee system, made up mainly of Shia police, in order to hold their Sunni detainees. When Cantu first sat down with a detainee held by the Iraqi police, however, he noticed the man had been tortured. In response, Cantu "usurped" his team leader by telling his lower-ranking team members not to speak to detainees.

"Our little mini-mutiny warranted a visit from our warrant officer, who asked me if I had seen the detainee be tortured, or otherwise coerced into talking, and I told him that I had not. He asked me how I knew the detainee had been tortured, and I told him about the swollen eye and the swollen lips. And he asked me again, 'Did you see him be tortured?' And I knew then what he was trying to say: If you didn't see it, it didn't happen. Plausible deniability," Cantu said.

Welcome to Camp X-Ray

Former Specialist Brandon Neely joined the army in August of 2000 as a military police officer. After 9/11 he was sent to Camp X-Ray, a temporary detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, where he was told that his "mission was going to be to guard the most dangerous men the world had to offer." Neely testified that he was told these men did not fall under the Geneva Conventions, and that there were no standard operating procedures for handling them, since the camp would be run as a "detainee camp [had] never been run before."

Common Article Three of all four Geneva Conventions prohibits cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, torture, as well as outrages against the human dignity of prisoners of war. Articles 13 and 16 of the Third Geneva Convention require that prisoners of war be treated humanely at all times, receive adequate health care, and not be discriminated against on the basis of race, nationality, religious belief, or political views.

After 9/11, however, President Bush skirted the Geneva Conventions and the usual conditions for prisoners of war by allowing U.S. forces to detain and treat suspected terrorists as the newly conceived term "illegal enemy combatants," and later as "unlawful enemy combatants" — moves that were roundly criticized by international monitoring groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Red Cross. By scuttling the rules of war, the Bush administration hoped to preemptively absolve itself, at least legally, of war crimes. In doing so, it opened the doors for torture and other human rights abuses that later characterized detention centers at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, problems the federal government is still grappling with.

Neely, who helped handle the first group of detainees to arrive at Camp X-Ray, described multiple instances of shocking prisoner treatment. Captors bullied and harassed detainees, as well as subjected them to sexual abuse and forced sensory deprivation. They kept detainees in small cages, "something like you would put a dog or animal into," all of them outdoors, he said. He recounted a chilling incident in which he and a partner overpowered an older detainee before the man was hog-tied and left for hours that way.

"We made our way on to the block and placed him in his cage. He went to his knees. My partner then took off his leg shackles. I still had control of his upper body, and I could still feel him tensing up. Once the shackles were off my partner started to take off the handcuffs. The detainee got really tense and started to pull away. We screamed at him to stop moving, and then so did the interpreter, over and over. Then he suddenly stopped. When my partner went back in to the take handcuffs off, he made a move to the left and jerked. Before I knew it, I threw the detainee to the ground and was on top of him, holding his face to the cement floor," he said.

Neely later heard from another inmate that the man thought he was going to be executed, because he had seen friends and family members executed on their knees. He reacted in natural fear.

"I did not feel good about what I did. It felt wrong. This man was old enough to be my father, and I just beaten him up," Neely said. "This is one of the incidents from my time at Guantánamo that truly haunts me."

"Her screams are in my dreams"

War wears on more than just the combatants, though, as Iraq veteran Rooster Romriell showed. Visibly shaken and in a choked voice, he described crimes committed against civilians, including an attack on a truck full of children as well as on a house raid that still haunts him.

"We came to one house, kicked in the door. There was a family. We detained them. They took the man to search for weapons. They found an AK, legal, and they zipcuffed him for security purposes. They sent me and another guy outside to keep an eye on the detainees. They brought us one AK-47 and a magazine, and an unserviceable, rusty revolver," he said.

"While I sat there, I watched as this old woman with an infant in her arms fell to the ground, a weeping mass of inconsolable sorrow, while they listened to two gunshots. The two gunshots passed through the face of an innocent man. Her children sat at her side and tried to console her. 'No, Americans wouldn't do that. No, they have our best interests in mind.' Unfortunately, it wasn't true. Her screams are in my dreams."

This kind of experience is an example of what can lead to the post-traumatic stress disorder from which numbers of current and former military personnel suffer. PTSD and other forms of mental stress can compound the financial, legal, work-related and personal problems that plague many veterans. Unsurprisingly, many homeless veterans suffer from PTSD, a problem the Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledges, although the VA says on their website that epidemiological studies do not show any causal link between military service and PTSD.

The VA's position on PTSD-combat links is untenable, though. Critics such as independent journalist Ilona Meagher, who edits the online journal PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within, argue that the government willfully ignores PTSD issues, which leads to troubling results such as increased troop suicides. Suicide among military personnel is a growing problem as the U.S. wars in the Middle East drag on and troops are called upon to serve more tours of duty. The New York Times reported in January that Army suicides rose for the fourth year in a row in 2008, increasing from 115 in 2007 to at least 128 in 2008. The 2008 figure was the highest suicide rate the military had seen in three decades, and indicated that the suicide rate among U.S. troops surpassed the suicide rate of U.S. civilians.

If left untreated, combat-related stress and mental pain can also manifest as violence, although this is less common than severe depression. On May 11, Army Sergeant John Russell of Sherman, Texas, murdered five military personnel at Camp Liberty in Iraq. CBS News reported that Russell may have become angry when doctors at a stress clinic said they did not believe he suffered from combat-related stress.

Photo by DC Tedrow

Members of the first panel answer questions from the audience. From left to right: Ronn Cantu, Brandon Neely, Dahlia Wasfi, and Rooster Romriell.

And then there are the Iraqi and Afghan victims. Romriell's nightmares and what many other vets experienced in Iraq are only snapshots of a brutal history imposed on the Iraqi people by the world's dominant military power. At least 90,000 civilians have died in violence since March 2003, according to IraqBodyCount.org, which draws numbers from news articles, organizational data, and official figures to estimate minimum and maximum body counts. This figure is surely conservative, though, since it relies only on confirmed media accounts and official figures. According to a 2006 study published in the British medical journal the Lancet, which relied on epidemiological methods to estimate body counts, as many as 600,000 Iraqis have died in violent conflict since March 2003. However, the highest estimate so far has been 1.2 million deaths, which was reported in a 2007 survey conducted by Opinion Research Business, a prestigious London-based polling agency.

If true, ORB and the Lancet's figures are four times higher than the 290,000 deaths Human Rights Watch attributes to Saddam Hussein for the entire period between 1979 and 2003. Moreover, as critics such as Noam Chomsky point out, some of Saddam's worst crimes during this period, such as his gassing the Kurds or use of chemical weapons against Iran, were carried out with crucial U.S. support.

These figures can also be added to the estimated 1 million Iraqis who died as a result of U.S.-enforced economic sanctions between 1991 and 2003. These figures included half a million children — a price the United States was willing to pay, as former Secretary of State Madeline Albright told 60 Minutes in 1996.

IVAW's challenge, as its members freely admit, is to not only help end the grinding assault on the birthplace of civilization, but also indemnify the victims of U.S. policies.

"What we can provide in the future is some kind of compensation or reparation for the damage we've done to these countries," said IVAW member Greg Foster, who spoke briefly after Romriell. "If we believe spending a trillion dollars on the U.S. economy will make our country more stable and prosperous, doesn't it make sense to spend some money building the economy of a country like Iraq, instead of fighting against people with no economic means to improve their own lives?"

"It's breaking all of us down, and it can't continue."

In a second panel at the Central Presbyterian Church, vets testified that the military wore on them personally. "You don't have to go oversees and fight to suffer from the causes of this war," explained former Petty Officer 2nd Class Marie Combs, the lone female military member who spoke at Winter Soldier.

After being sent to a base in Monterrey, California, to be trained as a Russian linguist, Combs witnessed systemic discrimination against women who sought medical help. In an interview for this publication, Combs explained that women's healthcare was so bad that female personnel would often joke about getting pregnant just so they could see civilian doctors.

"The stress was enormous," she said. "Every time I went in [to see a doctor], it was almost mandatory that I had to take a pregnancy test before they would do anything else."

When Combs sought treatment for a sore throat, a nurse told her that she was probably pregnant because another woman with a sore throat turned out to have been pregnant. Combs said the same nurse told her that, after this woman learned she was pregnant, she passed out and the nurse left her lying on the floor.

"I was just so mad I couldn't even say anything, and I still get mad thinking about the total disregard for this young woman," Combs said. "You'd think someone would have some sympathy. And then I felt bad that I never said anything about it. I never reported the incident to anybody."

Combs said the instructors knew that the healthcare staff was rude to most of the lower-level enlisted personnel, since several women had complained to them about the treatment they had received. However, said Combs, the women did not see any changes overall, and she did not know of any reprimands towards doctors.

"Healthcare is not a priority for the military," she said. "It's just about fixing us enough to get back to work."

In addition to receiving inadequate medical attention, enlisted women are often victims of sexual abuse. Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) wrote in the Los Angeles Times last year that according to Defense Department figures, only 181 out of 2,212 personnel investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts martial. Another 419 were settled with nonjudicial punishment, nonpunitive administration, or discharge, meaning military rapists received a slap on the wrist. Indeed, women serving in Iraq today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire, according to Harman.

Women who are raped are often discriminated against if they try to seek justice, according to journalist Helen Benedict, whose has described how widespread misogyny in the military actively fuels a rape culture.

"Platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a sexual assault has little chance of remaining anonymous," Benedict wrote in In These Times. "She will probably have to face her assailant day after day and put up with resentment and blame from other soldiers who see her as a snitch. She risks being persecuted by her assailant if he is her superior, and punished by any commanders who consider her a troublemaker. And because military culture demands that all soldiers keep their pain and distress to themselves, reporting an assault will make her look weak and cowardly."

Combs testified that the military also failed to provide crucial emotional support. When she experienced post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter, she sought help but was told she would need to wait two months before she could meet with anyone.

"But this wasn't just the fact that they couldn't help me with the depression that I had," she said. "It was the [active military] people who were coming back from Iraq. They didn't have anybody for them there [in Japan] either.... They had no family support ... no one there for them other than the other troops who had also been to Iraq. They didn't have any help."

These conditions contribute to problems such as PTSD. According to the VA, nearly 76,000 veterans received a provisional diagnosis of PTSD between 2002 and mid-2008. Because the war in Iraq is the first one in which military women are in combat roles, women are increasingly afflicted by PTSD.

Veteran homelessness is another oft-ignored issue. Approximately 154,000 homeless veterans make up about one-third of the adult homeless population in the United States, according to the VA. Nearly half suffer from mental and emotional illness, and about 70 percent suffer from alcoholism or drug abuse. The VA acknowledges that lack of family ties and support from friends and family are strong indicators of risk of homelessness among vets. But studies also show that PTSD strains and often breaks these connections.

"The more wars we start, the more countries we invade, the less amount of money we have to help these troops, the less time they have to recoup, to recover from the traumatic experiences," said Combs. "It's breaking all of us down, and it can't continue."

Building the movement

"The Winter Soldier is loyal, steadfast, faithful, staunch, resolute, and last but not least conscientious," said Doug Zachary, president of the Austin chapter of Veterans for Peace, who introduced the program of speakers. "It is through the public witness of winter soldiers that we can hear the truth; and inspired by their examples, informed by their witness, we can determine what good citizenship is, and then conscientiously ourselves act upon that knowledge."

These vets realize there's more to ending the occupations than bearing personal witness in public forums. In his testimony, for instance, Neely called for an official truth commission to document and archive witness testimony so that others know what happened at military prisons such as Guantánamo Bay. Historically, truth and reconciliation commissions play important roles in proving that official crimes occurred. These acknowledgments play a central role in healing nations brutalized by extreme violence. In December 2008, Neely heeded his own advice by delivering several pages' worth of testimony to UC Davis' Guantánamo Testimonials Project.

Unfortunately, the military's existence depends on enforcing a hierarchy, so it benefits from institutionalized forms of coercion, intimidation, and discrimination. This means it has strong disincentives to upend discriminatory practices or reel in abusive, shady policies. Although Winter Soldier events are an important vehicle for bringing the war home, the military's institutional structure raises hard questions about the prospects for meaningful change within it.

Photo by DC Tedrow

CAMEO member Khalid AlHashmi and others march through downtown Austin following Winter Soldier testimony.

To make serious headway, IVAW will need to continue building an antiwar movement. According to the group's website, any person who served or continues to serve in the U.S. military since Sept. 11, 2001 is eligible to join. In Texas, the organization has around 45 members and chapters based in Ft. Hood, Austin, and Houston. IVAW and its supporters hope that events like Winter Soldier will encourage more troops to speak out and join anti-war groups.

"We came down to Austin to see Winter Soldier because it's really the perspective of soldiers coming home from the front that really brings to light the horrors of war," said Jason Netek, a member of the Denton branch of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). "We know the anti-war movement needs anti-war soldiers and we hope that, by going to hear their testimony, that the many others who are still silent will see that they have support from the population and will come forth as well."

Others hope that IVAW and the Winter Soldier events will not only draw support for anti-war soldiers, but also bring more citizens into the anti-war movement and galvanize counter-recruitment efforts. Although many active-duty soldiers, veterans, and members of the anti-war left consider Obama an improvement over the Bush administration, they are concerned about his decision to shift the focus of combat operations from Iraq to Afghanistan rather than pull out of the Middle East entirely.

"He's definitely an improvement, but I'm not too optimistic about big changes in foreign policy. Afghanistan is just another occupation, just like Iraq. Maybe not directly for oil, but for an oil pipeline," said Victor Agosto, an anti-war veteran who was recently discharged for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan.

Agosto attended Winter Soldier, but did not testify. Following the event, however, he took action by refusing to deploy or do any military work related to deployment. On August 5, the Army stripped him of his rank and court martialed him and sentenced him to a month in Bell County Jail. His defiance of Ft. Hood's brass fired an opening shot from which other anti-war activists and potential war resisters continue to draw inspiration.

Before he refused deployment, Agosto said in an interview that he came to despair about his involvement in the occupation in Iraq. On March 7, he joined members of IVAW, the Austin branch of the ISO, and UT-Austin's Campus Antiwar Movement to End the Occupations. He took these steps in protest of military recruiters targeting school-aged children at Explore UT — an outreach program on the University of Texas at Austin campus. He and another veteran, Bobby Whittenberg, held signs encouraging kids to ask them what life in the military is really like.

"It's nothing like the commercials. That's the main thing that we're trying to get across here. If you sign up, you're probably going to end up being sent to a war that's based on lies, based on pure propaganda. You face the risk of hurting yourself or getting killed, and it'd really be for nothing. It'd be for nothing, other than maybe insurance money for your parents or something," Agosto said.

"I didn't actually realize it until I was in Iraq, and it just stopped making sense, the idea that we were there to fight a war on terror. You can't fight terror with even greater terror."